Dealing with Ambiguities in Informings: Finnish Aijaa as a “Neutral” News Receipt

Abstract

This article discusses the use of the Finnish particle aijaa in responding to informings. As a news receipt, aijaa is neutral in the sense that it does not display affect nor explicitly topicalize the prior talk. However, it is not closing implicative either but can be followed by further talk by the informer. The article focuses on how the “neutrality” and sequential ambiguity of the particle are manifested in different stages of a news delivery. It will be shown that aijaa is an adequate response to initial announcements but nonaffiliative and thus insufficient when responding to possibly complete, valenced tellings. The data are in Finnish with English translation.

Notes

¹ Unlike in Thompson et al. (2015), the systematic study of the role of prosody falls beyond the scope of this article. However, the prosodic formatting of individual aijaa tokens will be discussed within the analyses.

² Aijaa is composed of two different news particles that also occur on their own, ai and jaa. However, the combination is highly conventionalized, which is why it is treated here as a single item. Ai combines with other particles as well. See Koivisto (2013) for ai nii as a conventional claim of recollection.

³ These data were retrieved from two sources, (a) from a data archive housed at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki; and (b) from the project “Repair Practices and Understanding in Interaction,” led by Markku Haakana and Salla Kurhila (funded by the University of Helsinki during 2011–2013).

⁴ The possible additional turn components in the data include follow-up questions (as in example A), inferences, candidate understandings, displays of understanding, accounts, and assessments.

⁵ The pauses between an initial announcement and aijaa are not untypical (see also Extract 2), but they are also not a systematic property of the use of aijaa in this context.

⁶ Another, more typical context for stand-alone no is as a response to conventional preliminaries (as a “go-ahead”), such as in “A: ‘But guess what’ B: No” (Sorjonen, 2001, pp. 212–214; 2002, pp. 165–177).

⁷ According to Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and Button (1987), the first two closing components should be similar, such as okay–okay.

⁸ The term sound object can be used to describe sounds that are not response cries but even less wordlike vocalizations that can still be used for signaling emotive stances (see Couper-Kuhlen, 2012, p. 134; Reber, 2012). The sound object hmh could be characterized as an empathetic snort. It has a strong nasal quality, that is, air flows through nose.